Occitan herbals and recipe books…

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It’s time for a new Voynich research direction!

Thanks to Benedek Lang’s “Unlocked Books”, I’m starting to realise that I’ve perhaps spent too long thinking solely about codicology of the single text, when what is often as important is the ‘codicological context’ – i.e. the collection of other (but presumably conceptually related in some way) texts that were bound alongside by the owners and users of the text. Just because the Voynich Manuscript has come to us without any such informative context doesn’t automatically mean it would have been “so ronery” in its very early life too.

So… given that the Voynich Manuscript is (quite probably) a 15th century herbal / astronomical / astrological / recipe manuscript with both Occitan marginalia [the zodiac months] and possibly Occitan marginalia [f17r, f66r, f116v] in another hand, I suspect that the place to hunt for external codicological clues would surely be late medieval / early modern Occitan Provençal herbals and recipe books, for the simple reason that of all the documents we could think of, these are surely most likely to have shared one or more owners with the VMs, right?

And so I would like to thank Professoressa Maria Sofia Corradini at the University of Pisa for putting such a terrific amount of effort into collecting, editing and publishing a whole set of late medieval Occitan / Provençal herbals and recipe books back in 2004: here are the online versions of her edited texts (click on the headings below “Letteratura medico-farmaceutica” on the left to get started). The works she lists are:-

  • The Princeton Ricettario
    • Ms.: Princeton, Garrett 80, ff. 1r-9v;14r-18r; 21v-23v; 31v-36r.
  • The Auch Ricettari
    • Ms.: Auch, Archives départementales du Gers I 4066, ff. 15r-19v; ff. 71r-79v.
  • The Chantilly Ricettari
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 33r-37v; f. 53r; ff. 59v-62r; f. 71v.
  • Las vertutz de las herbas
    • Ms.: Princeton, Garrett 80, ff. 15v-21v.
    • Ms.: Auch, Archives départementales du Gers I 4066, ff. 2r-14v.
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 46r-52v.   [in verse]
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 53v-59v.  [in prose]
  • Letter from Hippocrates to Caesar
    • Ms.: Princeton, Garrett 80, ff. 9v-14r (seconda parte); ff. 23v-31v (prima parte).
    • Ms.: Auch, Archives départementales du Gers I 4066, ff. 67r-68v; 72v-73r; 77r-v;69r-71r.
  • The Thesaur de pauvres
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 1r-22r.
  • Appendix to the Thesaur de pauvres
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 26v-33r.
  • Rimedi per le febbri 
    • Ms.: Chantilly, Musée Condé 330, ff. 22v-26v.

Which is to say that while there are only three actual Occitan sources (Princeton, Auch, and Chantilly), each one comprises multiple documents, which presumably were copied from various sources (possibly overlapping, but let’s not get hung up on stemmatics here). In her preface, Prof.ssa Corradini notes the link between the medical schools around Montpellier and Toulouse and vernacular copies of texts, a local tradition to which these three books of Occitan would seem to attest.

Unfortunately, if you’re hoping at this point I’m going to include images or even some more detailed bibliographic information for these three items, you are sadly out of luck. I couldn’t find MS 330 at the Musée de Condé; the archive at Auch seems to have no online access at all; and the arcane front-end to Princeton’s legacy manuscript database quite defeated my search for MS Garrett 80. Perhaps someone else will do better in finding any of these?

Incidentally, the only secondary literature Prof.ssa Corradini mentions is a 1956 book by Clovis Brunel called “Recettes médicales alchimiques et astrologiques du XVe siècle en langue vulgaire des Pyrénées [beginning “Aysso es lo libre que fec lo mege Arcemis”]. Publiées [from the manuscript I 4066 of the Archives départementales du Gers]” according to the British Library, which has a copy (thank heavens), shelfmark 12238.ee.4/30.

Meanwhile, according to this page of links to related researchers, 54 years later “I[laria] Zamuner (Univ. di Chieti) is cataloguing all scientific texts in medieval Occitan, a task that will bring the work of Cl[ovis] Brunel up to date“. Central to this study is the Provençal vernacular version of the Secretum Secretorum, the one mentioned by Benedek Lang  (p.61) which helped set this whole train of thought in motion for me. But apparently J. Rodríguez Guerrero is also looking at some unpublished Occitania-area alchemical manuscripts from this period, which might also be very interesting; and there’s possibly more from Professor Peter Ricketts, too.

Might there be some kind of Occitan repository for scans of these documents, as part of the RIALTO project or something? I’ll ask around, but it may take some time to determine… please let me know or leave a comment here if you happen to find out! 🙂

Jaume Deydier’s “livre de raison”…

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Though I have a good-sized review of James Amelang’s fascinating book “The Flight of Icarus” in the pipeline, I couldn’t resist posting about one tiny Provençal / Occitan item that popped up there…

One of the many mysteries sustaining the Voynich Manuscript mythology is something which you’d have thought would be easy to sort out: a set of month names apparently added by a later owner to what VMs researchers call the “zodiac pages”. Here’s a set of annotated images I made of them a few years ago (which I ought to move over to this site soon), together with an explanation of why I think these are written in some form of Occitan.

When in 1997 Jorge Stolfi had much the same thought, he asked some Occitan researchers if they had any 15th-16th century texts with month names in: even though there are almost no such extant texts (because official documents were all written in French or Latin, while Occitan itself was in sharp decline), the closest match produced by this was from 15th century Toulon. Hence, for years I’ve wondered… what document was that, then?

Well… it looks like it’s listed in James Amelang’s book (p.281) – the bourgeous farmer Jaume Deydier from Ollioules (Var) near Toulon, who wrote his livre de raison (family chronicle) between 1477 and 1521. Helpfully, Amelang lists some page references (40-42, 230, 250-251) in Charles de Ribbe’s (1879) Les familles et la société en France avant la Révolution. Deydier’s first entry begins: “En nom de Nostre Senhor Dieu Jésus-Christ, et de la siena gloriosa Mayre, et de la sancta Cori ce-restial de Paradis, invocant loqual in tota bona et perfiecha obra si deu invocar, car del processis tout ben, nobilitat et profiech, Estament de mi, Jaume Deydier, natiff de Tholon, aras abitant en aquest present luoc d’Olliol.”

Digging deeper, de Ribbe’s (1898) La société provençale à la fin du moyen âge: d’après des documents inédits‎ has more on Deydier. For example, pp.453-454 has an extract from Deydier’s 1521 will, beginning: “Per memoria als successors de mi Jaume Deydier, expressamen à Jacques, mon obeyssant fils.”

Rather more recently than de Ribbe, there’s a 54-page book/article by Paul (or Gustave?) Roux titled Le Livre de raison de Jaume Deydier: un document d’une grande importance pour la Provence (1983), which appears to be an offprint from ‎Bulletin de la société des amis du vieux Toulon et de sa région, n°105‎.

All the same, you should be aware that there is a sizeable (if somewhat isolated?) French-language literature on the whole livre de raison genre, of which Deydier’s chronicle is merely one example. For example, if you go through this 2002 paper by Jean Tricard, you’ll find a decent-length literature list (Note 1). Tricard also comments (Note 5) that although de Ribbe launched the study of this genre, this was “pas toujours avec la plus grande rigueur scientifique d’ailleurs“, which I’m sure you can translate for yourself. 🙂

So – finally – back to the month names. Throughout all the fragmentary quotations from Deydier on the web, the only Provençal / Occitan month name I’ve found mentioned is “Septembre” (which is good, but which we knew anyway): however, without any idea of Deydier’s orthography etc, it’s a bit hard to tie this down any further.

Incidentally, Amelang cautions that many early modern popular / artisan historical autobiographical texts (the subject of his book) suffer both from a lack of a critical edition and from ‘selective’ (if not blatantly misleading) early translations: and so it is hard to be sure what we would find were we to look at Deydier’s chronicle for ourselves. Hence you might reasonably ask: is there a facsimile edition (or scans) out there of Deydier’s livre? Almost certainly not. Do I even have any idea of which library or collection holds Deydier’s original ms yet? No.

Even so, knowing what we don’t know is probably a (tiny) step in broadly the right direction.